Field
The example implementations described herein are related generally to computer systems and, more particularly, to an information technology (IT) management infrastructure in a cloud computing environment.
Related Art
Cloud computing is widely used in the related art. There are several related art solutions for managing cloud computing environments. One example related art solution for cloud environment management is as follows:                an infrastructure administrator is assigned to manage IT resources and store the IT resources in resource pools; and        an application administrator obtains IT resources from the resource pools using a self-service portal to execute his/her applications.        
Generally, the infrastructure administrators will optimize configurations of IT resources to satisfying Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of the cloud services they offer. This is done, for example, by migrating virtual servers or virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server (or one hypervisor) to another different physical server (or another different hypervisor).
Further, some application administrators utilize computing environments (i.e., IT resources provided from the cloud and software, including operating systems (OS), middleware and certain applications on them) as immutable environments. In other words, the application administrator does not modify any configurations and settings of the environment once it is in use. Instead, the application administrator will create a new environment by obtaining additional IT resources (i.e., additional computing environments) from the resource pools, deploying software on the additional IT resources and replacing the existing environments with the new computing environment. This replacement may be done by switching workloads from the existing environment to the new environment by using network routers and/or load balancers. By replacing the computing environment, rather than reconfiguring the computing environment, the operation status of the environments may be simplified.
In related art cloud computing environments, the infrastructure administrators cannot know whether application administrators are treating their computing environments as immutable environments (i.e., replacing computing environments with new environments, rather than reconfiguring the existing environments).
Further, in related art cloud computing environments, an infrastructure administrator cannot distinguish a computing environment (e.g. a virtual machine) created by the application administrator as a replacement for an existing computing environment (e.g., a virtual machine), from a computing environment, created to be a new computing environment (i.e., a virtual machine not created to replace an existing virtual machine).
In related art cloud computing environments, the infrastructure administrator can make optimizations of IT infrastructures that become inefficiencies due to replacements of VMs done by application administrators. For example, an infrastructure administrator may assign greater IT resources to an existing VM and fewer resources to a newly created VM, with less performance requirements. However, as the newly created VM takes over workload from the existing VM, the new VM requires more resources, while the existing VM requires fewer resources, contrary to the optimizations previously completed by the infrastructure administrator.
Further, infrastructure administrators may be unable to apply existing know-how (or policies) for managing existing VMs after they are replaced by new VMs because infrastructure administrators cannot recognize that the new VM is a replacement for the existing VM. The infrastructure administrator may only recognize that some new VMs have been created and some existing VMs have been deleted, but cannot identify specific replacements. As a result, existing know-how and/or policies may be lost when existing VMs are replaced.